Right now, every industry and every customer is going through a massive transformation, and cloud computing is often a central enabler of this. The silicon industry is also experiencing change as a critical part of the fast-growing cloud computing ecosystem—an ecosystem where silicon and chip design workloads must meet the rising bar for performance, complexity, and perceived costs. In Azure, we focus on the needs of the semiconductor design industry, so we can solve problems and provide solutions for our customers. With our partners at TSMC, we share the belief that using the cloud for silicon design will be a competitive advantage for those that embrace it.

Through our deep partnership, we have worked closely to implement an Azure-based architecture for TSMC’s Virtual Design Environment, refined cloud resource selection and storage architectures for specific workloads, and demonstrated cost versus performance optimizations for scalable workloads. This requires both new virtual machine (VM) types most suitable for EDA (Electronics Design Automation) workloads, and a cloud-optimized design solution that fully utilizes EDA parallelism. Starting from our collaboration with TSMC and its EDA ecosystem partners, we have jointly achieved multiple breakthroughs in both areas.

Microsoft and TSMC support cloud adoption in the silicon industry

To continue this momentum, Microsoft launches the Joint Innovation Lab with TSMC to serve as a collaboration platform to best integrate cloud and EDA innovations, and help provide the semiconductor industry with the performance and cost effectiveness to accelerate time-to-market and optimize development cost to unleash product innovations.

_“Nurturing ecosystem collaboration has been the core of TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP), and this Joint Innovation Lab with Microsoft is one big step forward elevating cross-industry partnership to the next level. TSMC has been one of the earliest drivers of cloud to speed up design enablement for customers since 2018. Through our collaboration with Cloud Alliance members, we can lower entry barriers of Cloud adoption for our common customers and help customers conduct IC design securely in the Cloud and achieve faster time-to-market. Microsoft has been a great partner, and its Silicon on Azure team shares a similar vision with us.” _– Dr. Cliff Hou, Senior Vice President of Technology Development at TSMC

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